I am still in shock over the 5.20 GA Republican Primary … That said, I will repeat a favorite tv quote:

“No, I call myself a Republican because I am one. I believe in market solutions and I believe in common sense realities and necessity to defend itself against a dangerous world. The problem is now I have to be homophobic. I have to count the number of times people go to church. I have to deny facts and think scientific research is a long con. I have to think poor people are getting a sweet ride. And I have to have such a stunning inferiority complex that I fear education and intellect in the 21st Century. Most of all, the biggest new requirement-–the only requirement-–is that I have to hate Democrats.”

follow up, Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights: It is fascinating that people can interpret the same passage and reconstruct the same history to such different ends.

… no amendment received less attention in the courts in the two centuries following the adoption of the Bill of Rights than the Second, except the Third (which dealt with billeting soldiers in private homes). It used to be known as the “lost amendment,” because hardly anyone ever wrote about it. The assertion that the Second Amendment protects a person’s right to own and carry a gun for self-defense, rather than the people’s right to form militias for the common defense, first became a feature of American political and legal discourse in the wake of the Gun Control Act of 1968, and only gained prominence in the nineteen-seventies. A milestone in its development came when Orrin Hatch, serving on Strom Thurmond’s Senate Judiciary Committee, became chair of the Subcommittee on the Constitution. Hatch commissioned a history of the Second Amendment, resulting in a 1982 report, “The Right to Keep and Bear Arms,” which concluded, “What the Subcommittee on the Constitution uncovered was clear—and long lost—proof that the second amendment to our Constitution was intended as an individual right of the American citizen to keep and carry arms in a peaceful manner, for protection of himself, his family, and his freedoms.”

…

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, American historians who disagreed with the individual and insurrectionist interpretations of the Second Amendment began to take them more seriously when it became clear that a conservative judiciary was taking them seriously, and that a test case would reach the Supreme Court. An important statement of what is generally referred to as the collective-rights interpretation—the idea that what the Second Amendment protects is the people’s collective right to keep and bear arms to form militias for the common defense—is an amicus curiae submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2008 case of District of Columbia v. Heller, signed by fifteen eminent university professors of early American history, including Pauline Maier, Fred Anderson, and Pulitzer Prizes winners Jack Rakove and Alan Taylor. It concludes,

Historians are often asked what the Founders would think about various aspects of contemporary life. Such questions can be tricky to answer. But as historians of the Revolutionary era we are confident at least of this: that the authors of the Second Amendment would be flabbergasted to learn that in endorsing the republican principle of a well-regulated militia, they were also precluding restrictions on such potentially dangerous property as firearms, which governments had always regulated when there was “real danger of public injury from individuals.”

The different weight the Court gave to these different interpretations is suggested by its decision in Heller. Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, determined that, “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia.”

…

In his remarks before the N.R.A. last week, Gingrich offered a human-rights interpretation of the Second Amendment. “A Gingrich presidency,” he said, “will submit to the United Nations a treaty that extends the right to bear arms as a human right for every person on the planet.”

The United States has the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world, twice that of the country with the second highest rate, which is Yemen. The United States also has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy, nearly four times higher than France or the United Kingdom, six times higher than Germany. In the United States in 2008, guns were involved in two-thirds of all murders. Of interest to many people concerned about these matters, then, is when the debate over the Second Amendment will yield to a debate about violence.

We’re not in an ideal world, of course; we’re in the news cycle. In the above video, when Greta Van Susteren asks Fortgang what “check your privilege” meant, he replies, “I don’t think the people who are saying ‘check your privilege’ really know what it means.”

That’s a bad way to start a dialouge, but it’s how you talk when you’re inhabiting the world of cable news—you claim your ideological opponents don’t understand the words they use, you scoff and gloat your way through two-minute segments until everyone who agrees with you is convinced you’ve won the argument. These “debates” are all empty calories, and the people who publicize them move on to the next thing as soon as they possibly can, because there’s a cycle to feed with anger and elation. Current candidates for outrage include a black teacher suing a school after being mocked for her race, a Republican senate candidate who once worked as a drag queen, and a California school that asked students to write papers about whether the Holocaust actually happened. That’s a lot of privilege to be checked!

The cycle will soon return Fortgang to Princeton, where he and his Weltanschauung will no doubt continue to irritate his peers and where he’ll continue to write things that will one day make him cringe as he looks back on them. Hopefully now that he’s no longer on television he’ll be able to learn something.

End of an era, Davidson College, Laundry Service: There are so many great things about Davidson, but this very quirky one will be sorely missed by its loyal sons undaunted (and daughters).

Davidson College announced today that it will discontinue free full-service laundry for all students, beginning May 15, 2015. Students will continue to have access to free self-service laundry facilities across campus.

The decision comes at a time when Davidson is aligning its resources to meet educational priorities within the changing landscape of higher education. As a result, the college is reprioritizing the services and amenities it offers to students.

“This transition reflects our vision for Davidson now and into the future,” said Davidson College President Carol Quillen. “We are committed to sustaining what is intrinsic and distinctive to Davidson, while offering new services and programs that prepare and enable Davidson graduates to thrive in a global society.”

In the past year, the college has celebrated the opening of “Studio M,” a new makerspace that fosters technological creativity and exploration, and introduced Africana Studies, an interdisciplinary department. In the next year, the college plans to expand career development offerings to meet growing student interest in career counseling and internship placement as a well as move to a 24/7 library for students.

While the majority of first-year students utilize full laundry service, that rate drops over a student’s time at Davidson. Only about 35 percent of seniors use the free full-service laundry, opting instead to use the free self-service facilities.

The full service laundry facility opened in 1920 and has operated as a free full-service laundry for more than 90 years.

Nooooooo the horror of it al!!! l #76. How will the students get their flannel shirts to stand up in the corner now????

NOOOOO. After doing a 9-day college tour with my daughter, trying to decide exactly what “made the Dickinson Experience unique,” and concluding that nothing made any of the top schools unique except the Laundry at Davidson, I hate this. Get rid of “graduate-level research.” Everyone has that!

Boo!

It was one of the factors that made my daughter choose Davidson over Vassar (and the weather). She sent me a text this afternoon to let me know. The writer of the story on Davidson.edu would have received a C or worse from Charlie Lloyd, and I was disappointed in President Quillen’s comments. I agree with Anne Lupo – there’s nothing wrong with tradition, and the quirkiness of free laundry as an amenity was pretty neat. Davidson will become less distinctive, as it continues to try to climb up the greasy pole of the U.S. News & World Report rankings. Am I cynical to note that the announcement comes at the end of the year, when exams are upon the students, and nobody is liable to protest?

That leaveis a great business opportunity for some enterprising students. Laundry pickup and delivery.

According to the Observer website it cost 400,000 per year to run – only 500 per student. I bet they want the building for another purpose. Did they do dry cleaning on site? Superfund site?

When we were there they added a mandatory $300 per year charge to pay for laundry. If it would only be $500 per year now, that is the best bargain around! Tuition, room and board are up by a factor of 10 since I was there. Laundry up only 67%? Yikes!

Let’s protest!!

Free laundry! What a great battle cry.

I was sorely disappointed to hear this news. I agree with ____ too! What next – self scheduled exams?

Solo in Paris – NYTimes.com.:

It was easy in Paris to surrender to the moment. But why? What alchemy transmuted ordinary activities, be it a walk across a bridge or the unwrapping of butter, into a pleasure? My default speed in New York is “hurtle,” yet in Paris I dragged the edge of a fork across an oyster with a care better suited to sliding a bow across a violin.

This was not simply because I was in Paris, though it has long held a kind of magic for many Americans. It was because I was there on my own. In a city that has been perfecting beauty since the reign of Napoleon III, there are innumerable sensual details — patterns, textures, colors, sounds — that can be diluted, even missed, when chattering with someone or collaborating on an itinerary. Alone one becomes acutely aware of the hollow clack of pétanque balls in a park; the patina of Maillol’s bronze “Baigneuse se Coiffant” that makes her look wet even on a cloudless day in the Tuileries; how each of the empty wine bottles beside sidewalk recycling bins is the embodiment of someone’s good time. There is a Paris that deeply rewards the solo traveler.

Indeed, the city has a centuries-old tradition of solo exploration, personified by the flâneur, or stroller. Flânerie is, in its purest form, a goal-less pursuit, though for some it evolved into a purposeful art: Walking and observing became a method of understanding a city, an age. Baudelaire described the flâneur as a passionate spectator, one who was fond of “botanizing on the asphalt,” as the essayist Walter Benjamin would later put it. Typically, it was a man. No longer.

…

I had taken the book, by Patricia Wentworth, because I recognized the sticker on the cover: Bookcrossing.com, a website that encourages people to read, register and hide books in the world for others to find. For years I had wanted to discover one. Later, when I went on the site to register that I had the book, there was a message from its former, anonymous owner: “This book was not lost,” it said in French, “it was found for a new reader.”

Most of us are allowed at least one direct experience of God (within bounds)–something that knocks us for a loop, blows our circuits, calls all our old certainties into question. Some churches even require you to produce one as proof of your conversion. But even in congregations that welcome signs and wonders on a regular basis, there seems to be a general consensus that life in Christ means trading in your old certainties for new ones.

Once you emerge from the cloud, you are supposed to be surer than ever what you believe. You are supposed to know who’s who, what’s what, where you are going in your life and why. You are supposed to have answers to all the important questions, and when you read the Bible you are supposed to know what it means. You have your Christian decoder ring, now use it!

But what if the point is not to decode the cloud but to enter into it? What if the whole Bible is less a book of certainties than it is a book of encounters, in which a staggeringly long parade of people run into God, each other, life–and are never the same again? I mean, what don’t people run into in the Bible? Not just terrifying clouds and hair-raising voices but also crazy relatives, persistent infertility, armed enemies, and deep depression, along with life-saving strangers, miraculous children, food in the wilderness, and knee-wobbling love.

Whether such biblical encounters come disguised as “good” or “bad,” they have a way of breaking biblical people open, of rearranging what they think they know for sure so that there is room for more divine movement in their lives. Sometimes the movement involves traveling from one place to another. Sometimes it means changing their angle on what is true and why. Sometimes it involves the almost invisible movement of one heart toward another.

Certainties can become casualties in these encounters, or at least those certainties that involve clinging to static notions of who’s who and what’s what, where you are going in your life and why. Those things can shift pretty dramatically inside the cloud of unknowing, where faith has more to do with staying fully present to what is happening right in front of you than with being certain of what it all means. The meeting–that’s the thing.

There is no way to be sure, but I think Peter sensed that. When Jesus lit up right in front of him, Peter knew what he was seeing. The Bible calls it “God’s glory”–the shining cloud that is the sure sign of God’s capital P Presence. In the Book of Exodus, when Moses climbed Mount Sinai to fetch the tablets of the law, the whole top of the mountain stayed socked in divine cloud cover for six whole days. In 1 Kings, when Solomon dedicated the Temple in Jerusalem, a dense cloud filled up that huge place so that the priests could not even see what they were supposed to be doing. When Ezekiel had his vision of the four living creatures, he saw them in the middle of “a great cloud with brightness around it and fire flashing forth continually.”

That’s what God’s glory looks like, apparently: a big bright cloud–dark and dazzling at the same time–an envelope for the Divine Presence that would blow people away if they looked upon it directly–so God in God’s mercy placed a cloud buffer around it, which both protected the people and made it difficult for them to see inside.

Students at Davidson College are well acquainted with stress. Although many have already developed their own tactics to manage anxieties, a new outlet will soon become available for the Davidson community in the form of a labyrinth.

On Sunday evening, in a discussion themed “Life is not Linear,” College Chaplain Robert Spach ’84, Lauren Cunningham ’09 and Dr. Trisha Senterfitt, spoke in the 900 Room about Davidson’s plans to build the stress-reliever.

Guest speaker Senterfitt received her doctorate in Ministry from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur and wrote her dissertation on labyrinths.

She claimed that the 180 degree turns made when walking a labyrinth relieve stress.

For this reason, the benefits of a labyrinth walk exceed those of a standard walk down Main Street.

She suggested that the act of walking a labyrinth engages the right side of the brain, the side that manages creativity and imagination.

In doing this, a balance is created between the right side and the left, which, on hte other hand, is utilized most frequently by the typical college student bogged down by mathematical equations and essays.

Senterfitt cited the success of labyrinths in the treatment of patients with neurological disorders due to this balance in brain function.

Furthermore, she said she believes so firmly in the importance of the labyrinth that her husband constructed one in their backyard.

She finds comfort in walking the labyrinth to reflect, to give thanks and to relax.

Senterfit has lofty goals for the Davidson labyrinth. She envisions some students taking regular meditative walks and others utilizing the structure around more stressful times such as exam period.

Both Senterfitt and Cunningham spoke of how the labyrinth could potentially enhance several disciplines at Davidson.

Math students could explore its geometry, historians could explore its significance in early history and art students could use it in their studies of spatial relations.

Cunningham’s involvement in the project began in the summer of 2007.

The idea of a Davidson labyrinth dawned on her after reading a book that conveyed the author’s moving experience with labyrinths. Cunningham, Spach and Professor Cort Savage met with President Ross to present their idea.

A Labyrinth Committee formed and the community warmly received its proposals.

The labyrinth is expected to positively effect students physically, emotionally and spiritually.

Logistically speaking, the labyrinth will be located in Hobart Park, which is situated between Faculty Drive and the Baker parking lot.

At an estimated 30 feet in diameter, it will be built of concrete.

The labyrinth in Chartes, Cathedral in France serves as the inspiration for its design.

The labyrinth will be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Its date of completion is unknown and dependant of funding.

The kit used to build the labyrinth and its installation will cost an estimated $30,000.

Approximately two-thirds of the cost has been pledged by the President’s Office and an anonymous donor.

Individual students can help the funding effort by purchasing labyrinth t-shirts and tickets for the Amazing Maize Maze located in Mooresville.

Jack and Trisha Senterfitt: From the article above, I found this couple to be great fun … they remind me of some people I know.

We’re Jack and Trisha Senterfitt, aka Santa and Mrs. Claus, and on March of 2013 we embarked on a great adventure! While I retired in 2007 after a career as an attorney, Trisha just retired at the end of March. She’s a Presbyterian minister who, after 14 years in parish ministry in Atlanta, became the Director of The Craddock Center in Cherry Log, Georgia–an outreach ministry to low income families, primarily focusing on children’s enrichment in north Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina. She loved doing this, but decided last year to retire, so we could travel, spend time seeing this great country and visiting friends everywhere. So in August of 2012 we found a 2008 Winnebago View in mint condition close to our home and this was the trigger for her to go ahead and retire.

Comment from one of our visitors over the weekend: “Did the kayak rental today – the four hour trip – had a fabulous experience. It was so exquisite, and so filled with wildlife and nature’s beauty it was hard to believe I was in Metro Louisville. My only regret is that I’ve missed this all my life…up until now! I have a new love: Kayaking at The Parklands. Thank you for enriching our lives.” What a great testimonial for our new paddling rentals through Green Earth Outdoors! Learn how you can experience it for your self, here:

NBA, Warriors: from a friend who knows mores about sports than I will ever know …

You have got to be kidding me. The Warriors had been a joke for years. Jackson took them to the playoffs two years in a row for the first time in over 20 years. If you listen to the audio, a couple players complained he showed “favoritism” to Steph Curry. Yeah, you wouldn’t want to keep your best player happy. Unbelievable.

Atlanta Braves, Cobb County stadium, Turner Field, The Ted, field of dreams, “stadium” v. “field”, places/spaces, end of an era: This is a major fail in my opinion. The Ted is not a “stadium” it’s a “field.” There are only a few fields. Ask me why this makes me sad.

The beginning of the end …

Braves announce new stadium 11/11/13 | 00:01:27

Braves president John Schuerholz announces the team’s plans to build a new ballpark set to open for the 2017 season

At the groundbreaking ceremony for Atlanta Stadium in 1964. #wouldagrammed #braves

…

Done 😦

Statement from Mayor Kasim Reed on the Atlanta Braves

ATLANTA – The Atlanta Braves are one of the best baseball teams in America, and I wish them well. We have been working very hard with the Braves for a long time, and at the end of the day, there was simply no way the team was going to stay in downtown Atlanta without city taxpayers spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make that happen. It is my understanding that our neighbor, Cobb County, made a strong offer of $450M in public support to the Braves and we are simply unwilling to match that with taxpayer dollars. Given the needs facing our city and the impact of Turner Field stadium on surrounding neighborhoods, that was something I, and many others were unwilling to do. We have been planning for the possibility of this announcement and have already spoken to multiple organizations who are interested in redeveloping the entire Turner Field corridor. Over the next three years, we will be working with our prospective partners to bring residential and business development that is worthy of our city and strengthens our downtown. Those conversations will continue and I am excited about how we use the land that is now Turner Field, to be a tremendous asset for our residents, our city, and our region for years to come.

The Atlanta Braves announced Monday that they will move out of Atlanta before the start of the 2017 season, when they will open what can only be an extravagant new ballpark outside the city’s borders in suburban Cobb County.

Because this is the way things are done now, the project will rely heavily on public funding, with $450 million of the $672 million projected cost coming from a county that just cut 182 teaching jobs because of a budget shortfall. That’s ridiculous, as is the Braves stated reason for moving: the team that secured public financing to convert Atlanta’s Olympic Stadium into Turner Field just 16 years ago, in part by arguing that the venue would help revitalize the urban community around it, is now leaving because the stadium didn’t improve the community around it. Its argument for moving to the current location is now its argument for moving away from it. On top of that, the Braves are leaving Turner Field in part because of a lack of easy public transit access for a location with no public transit that connects to the city. If all of that doesn’t shine quite a bright light on the foolishness of public funding, what will?

We are attached to places. Wendell Berry closes his Collection of Sabbath Poems with the words, “There is a day when the road neither comes nor goes, and the way is not a way but a place.”

Over the years, there are private places that have become touchstones of our lives. For me, there is the bench outside Alabama Hall over at Emory University where my husband of now 48 years told me he loved me for the first time. There is the quiet spot near the fence in our backyard where a gardenia bush blooms abundantly every summer, and the ashes of our favorite kitty lie buried beneath its shadow.

We are deeply attached to public places too. The experiences we have in them with other people create that precious sense of being a part of the whole. Our shared memories and common hopes create these places of special meaning.

2013 summer storms, Davidson College, Chambers Building, iconic cedars, end of an era, Trees by Joyce Kilmer: I can’t believe how sad this makes me, and I am not alone. … But only God can make a tree … Please make two for Chambers …

To maintain the symmetry of the Chambers façade, the damaged trees matching mate on the north side of the front steps will also be taken down. The removal has been scheduled for this Thursday, July 11. Two new trees will be planted in place of the downed cedars, though the species and date of planting are yet to be determined.The precise date the two campus icons were planted is unknown, but photographs from the Davidson College archives indicate it occurred during the 1930s.

kith/kin, civil rights movement, Taylor Branch, Better World Books, Parting the Waters: I don’t know what I was thinking. First, my brother recommends the three volume series on the civil rights movement by Taylor Branch. Second, they are available from Better World Books for $14 (total, including shipping). Third, they are each over 1000 pages.

I love the opening line to the first volume, Parting the Waters, “Almost as color defines vision itself, race shapes the cultural eye– what we do and do not notice, the reach of empathy and the alignment of response.”

This will not be light summer reading.

Green’s Lunch Inc, kith/kin, Charlotte icons: Blast from my past … — at Green’s Lunch Inc. I had not been here in years … and my sister told me that she had traced a branch of an 1890 Walker Family Tree to Mary Green. The current owners are are not related to the Greens. They assumed the original owner Mary Green is the Walker relative.

Fred Berretta, Hudson flight, PTS: Fred is a work associate of my husband.

The passengers who were aboard the miracle on the Hudson know exactly what it’s like to walk away from a downed plane.

US Airways Flight 1549 was on its way to Charlotte from New York when a flock of geese took out its engines.

It splash-landed on the Hudson River and all 155 people on board survived — including Frank Berretta from Weddington.

He says when he saw the San Francisco crash on the news it immediately brought him back to Jan. 15, 2009.

“Families of the victims who passed away obviously have it the worst. They’re in shock and wondering why their two girls didn’t make it, as well as other passengers are having that survivors guilt,” said Berretta.

Berretta says getting through the lingering effects of post-traumatic stress takes a lot longer than many realize.

Dean Clark Ross, Davidson College, kudos, end of an era: I took a course from Dr. Ross his first year at Davidson! He has been an exceptional part of an exceptional place. Cheers!

Then Clark himself sauntered to the podium, hands in pockets. He told stories on himself and his own mentors and colleagues across campus—Ratliff, Zimmerman, Nelson, Spencer, Williams, Kuykendall. He tipped his figurative hat to students through the years, now alumni. And then he brought it all back to four pillars of Davidson that he sees as solid as the pillars of Chambers itself: faith, reason, honor, service.

“Those four things have never really changed,” he said. “The people have changed, and the manifestations have changed, and will change, and need to. But the underlying faith, reason, honor and service remain.”

Making a neat pile of books and magazines will bring order to a coffee table in a matter of minutes. For this Hamptons home, designer David Lawrence created a sophisticated tabletop display by placing flowers and candles atop the books. The fabric on the sofa is Vizir in Indigo from Old World Weavers. Throw pillows by Ralph Lauren.

So how about those newfangled three-dee printing machines? I guess they’re a thing. But in all seriousness, PBS Off Book’s overview of the current state of 3D printers and their potential is pretty on target. One worry I have is that 3D printers become synonymous with CNC machines, a category that goes beyond the scope of MakerBots and RepRap machines. 3D printers have a great future, but it’s a whole host of different CNC machines (and those working in concert) that will change the world.

Stephen Curry’s career night in Madison Square Garden against the New York Knicks. Curry was 18 of 28 shooting, including 11 of 13 from 3-point range. He also had 7 assists, 6 rebounds and 3 steals. He became just the 13th player to reach the 50-point mark at the arena. His 54 is the third most points scored by a visiting player in Madison Square Garden since 1968, behind Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan.

Around 2 p.m. on Wednesday, Harald Olsen, a Korean translator looking for work — “casualty of the sequester,” he says — thought he was about to go home after having lunch with a friend.

Instead, he and three other people helped escort a family of ten ducks a mile through downtown D.C.

It all started as Olsen was “walking from the World Bank building to the Farragut North Metro station,” he says. “I was heading home after lunch. One benefit of unemployment.”

He was waylaid by a mother duck and her nine ducklings, attracting attention in a park on Pennsylvania Avenue — some admiring attention, and some concern; as Olsen wrote on his Reddit post of the photos, one person called the police, and another called the Humane Society.

But before the arrival of any authorities, the ducks got moving. “Kind of like water flowing downhill, the ducks knew which direction they wanted to go,” says Olsen.

Dr. William Marlin, Case Western Reserve University, Urbanization and the Detective Novel, Academic Minute, NPR: Love this show … but often forget to look it up …

The detective novel grew up with public concerns about modern, urban life, particularly crime. But crime as a feature of Western life was not recognized until the rise of large cities in the early 1800s, the period when a mass reading public appeared. The new cities were chaotic, without maps, police, or even named streets. New city-dwellers were fascinated by and afraid of crime, they vilified and romanticized criminals, as well as the police who fought them.The first writing on urban crime pretended to be documentary, but it was filled with archetypes and plots from preceding fiction, particularly the gothic novel. The idea of detection and the figure of the detective were introduced in the early nineteenth century by a Frenchman, Francois-Eugene Vidocq. He had been a soldier, smuggler, convict and stoolie, but he also founded the French “security services” in 1812.

…

When Vidocq’s Memoirs were published in 1828, they were immediately popular and translated into English. Balzac modeled the character of Vautrin in Le Pere Goriot on Vidocq , and Victor Hugo did the same with Jean Valjean in Les Misérables . In England the interest in “crime stories” blended with a strong, existing genre called the gothic novel. Its influence accounts for the dark settings, obscure motives, and brilliant solutions in the genre. Vidocq also influenced Charles Dickens, who used detail and character for Great Expectations In the U. S., Edgar Allan Poe read both Dickens and Vidocq. Then in five stories between 1840 and 1845, he then laid out the formal detective story.

Pope Benedict, resignation, end of an era, Twitter: “Romans …salute” … Just don’t think of “Romans” in contemporary terms … I wonder if I would go to my rooftop and wave?

Rachel Donadio — NYT

@RachelDonadio

Romans stand on rooftops waving flags to salute the pope as he flies by helicopter into retirement. sunny here today. nice weather for it.

“Do Not Be Afraid”, Dr. James Howell,

St. Fr

ancis’ Prayer Before the Crucifix, YouTube: “Look carefully how you walk” … “walk intentionally” … A theme of mine this Lenten season … for some reason I saved this one during my non blogging year … seemed a good one to post today. “Do Not Be Afraid” Dr. James Howell – YouTube. And during his sermon he mentioned this prayer …

St. Francis’ Prayer Before the Crucifix

Most High glorious God, enlighten the darkness of my heart.

Give me right faith, sure hope and perfect charity.

Fill me with understanding and knowledge that I may fulfill your command.

art, Renaissance art, Africans, The Economist: Something I never thought about … like yesterday, i never thought about Southern art and the Romantic period …

The exhibition ends on a high note with a four-foot tall, gilded-wood statue of Saint Benedict of Palermo. Benedict was born in Sicily to Ethiopian slaves and freed at the age of 18. He became a Franciscan monk and inspired many with his goodness and equanimity. By the early 17th century Benedict was venerated in Italy, Spain and Latin America. He is the patron saint of African-Americans, and churches devoted to his name can be found as far afield as Buenos Aires, Bahía and the Bronx.

Thanks to research that continues to be done by historians and curators such as Ms Spicer, we now know that some of these freed Africans became bakers and gondoliers, mattress makers and courtiers. A few more have been named. However, much still remains to be discovered. Research into the lives of Africans in Renaissance Europe is not finished; in fact, it is only just beginning.

Charlotte, snow: I was happy last night … I must have at least one snow a year.

history, Lent: So, I am a Pharisee now …

Nevertheless, I was always taught, “If you gave something up for the Lord, tough it out. Don’t act like a Pharisee looking for a loophole.”

…

Over the years, modifications have been made to the Lenten observances, making our practices not only simple but also easy. Ash Wednesday still marks the beginning of Lent, which lasts for 40 days, not including Sundays. The present fasting and abstinence laws are very simple: On Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, the faithful fast having only one full meal a day and smaller snacks to keep up ones strength and abstain from meat; on the other Fridays of Lent, the faithful abstain from meat. People are still encouraged “to give up something” for Lent as a sacrifice. An interesting note is that technically on Sundays and solemnities like St. Josephs Day March 19 and the Annunciation March 25, one is exempt and can partake of whatever has been offered up for Lent.Nevertheless, I was always taught, “If you gave something up for the Lord, tough it out. Dont act like a Pharisee looking for a loophole.” Moreover, an emphasis must be placed on performing spiritual works, like attending the Stations of the Cross, attending Mass, making a weekly holy hour before the Blessed Sacrament, taking time for personal prayer and spiritual reading and most especially making a good confession and receiving sacramental absolution. Although the practices may have evolved over the centuries, the focus remains the same: to repent of sin, to renew our faith and to prepare to celebrate joyfully the mysteries of our salvation.

Wonder what it says about FB that so many people are abstaining from it for Lent?

and one of his friend’s comment …

I’m Betting they cheat and look ..just not commenting.

via BW

Lent, Lenten devotionals: These jumped out at me …

Thursday February 14, 2013

Seeing the Beauty and Goodness in Front of Us

We don’t have to go far to find the treasure we are seeking. There is beauty and goodness right where we are. And only when we can see the beauty and goodness that are close by can we recognize beauty and goodness on our travels far and wide. There are trees and flowers to enjoy, paintings and sculptures to admire; most of all there are people who smile, play, and show kindness and gentleness. They are all around us, to be recognized as free gifts to receive in gratitude.

Our temptation is to collect all the beauty and goodness surrounding us as helpful information we can use for our projects. But then we cannot enjoy it, and we soon find that we need a vacation to restore ourselves. Let’s try to see the beauty and goodness in front of us before we go elsewhere to look for it.

Indeed, the God of my rigid ideologies, of my complacent Theology; the God who validates my unwillingness to explore heresies, and rewards me for arrogantly dismissing them as sinful; the God who grounds my intellectual arrogance in His omniscience, and my politics in his omnipotence; the God who vanquishes all of His and my inquisitive foes, forever silencing their obnoxious questions with the fires of Hell; whose very Nature demands that humans separate and categorize the world into manageable divisions; the God who has made His Will known to us through Natural Law, and a Holy Book, every word of which we are to follow without hesitation or consideration; whose ethical character remains beyond discussion; whose decisions remain beyond the scope of human analysis; the God who grounds all Thought in his Being – this God, who is Himself nothing more than an idol of Modernism, is dead.

My goal for Lent is to remember this death, and to meditate on it in reverence, humility, and mystery. And to reflect not on the God who rules by power, but a god who leads by love; who identifies with the weak; whose foolishness upsets omniscience; a God who reveals Himself in many ways, who reveals Himself in a first century peasant named Jesus; a God who empties Himself of God, and offers Himself to his enemies in submission and servitude; who is concerned with the plight of widows and orphans, the least among us, and the disadvantaged; who sends Jesus to go after the marginalized and the misunderstood, and to bring back home again those who have been ostracized and forgotten.

I am giving up God for Lent to make room for God. I am prying open my fingers, and letting all of my theological idols crash to the ground. And I am lifting up my empty hands to Heaven in anticipation of God’s arrival, and quietly echoing the unsettling words of Meister Eckhart: “I pray God to rid me of God.”

Kneeling in Jerusalem, Ann Weems, Lent: Ann Weems’ book Kneeling in Jerusalem is a great resource during Lent.

LENT

Lent is a time to take the time

to let the power of our faith story take hold of us,

a time to let the events

get up and walk around in us,

a time to intensify

our living unto Christ,

a time to hover over

the thoughts of our hearts,

a time place our feet in the streets of Jerusalem or to walk along the sea and listen to his word,

a time to touch his robe

and feel the healing surge through us,

a time to ponder and a time to wonder . . .

Lent is a time to allow a fresh new taste of God!

from Kneeling in Jerusalem by Ann Weems

clergywear, pastors, stoles, FPC-Charlotte, Lent, fyi:

What Are Our Pastors Wearing Around Their Necks?

Of all the questions I have received since arriving as your pastor last September, the most popular has been about what we wear on Sunday during worship.

The name for what we wear around our necks is a “stole.” Stoles are worn by the clergy of many denominations – Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, Episcopal, and Roman Catholic.

The shape of a stole is reminiscent of a yoke that symbolizes the yoke of Christ, which reminds those of us who wear the stole (and those who see us wearing it) of whom we serve. Stoles are a symbol of ordained ministry – and are often given as gifts to a pastor on his or her ordination to service in the Church.

You may have noticed that the stoles we wear even change colors! The color of our stoles follows the season of the Christian year: purple in Advent and Lent, white in Christmas and Easter, green in ordinary times, and red in Pentecost.

You’ll also notice that the color of our stoles coordinates with the materials that cover both the pulpit and the communion table. These materials are called “paraments.”

Christians follow a different calendar – defined by our salvation history – because as we are baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, we are called to live a different kind of life.

Finally, most of your pastors’ stoles have a story – about where they were made or by whom they were given. Feel free to ask us about them sometime!

The rest of Uncreative Writing goes on to explore the history of appropriation in art, the emerging interchangeability between words and images in digital culture, the challenges of defining one’s identity in the vastness of the online environment, and many other pressing facets of what it means to be a writer — or, even more broadly, a creator — in the age of the internet. Complement it with the equally subversive How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

Letters From Father Christmas is one of my favorite Christmas books that I shared with my children … and to a large extent because of Tolkien’s whimsical drawings, I know I would love this edition of The Hobbit.

A rare piece of cross-disciplinary creativity from the mind of one of modern history’s greatest creators, Art of the Hobbit is equal parts literary treasure and treat of art, exploring the notion of the author as designer — a particularly timely concept in the age of self-publishing and disciplinary cross-pollination in the making of books.

Every December an envelope bearing a stamp from the North Pole would arrive for J.R.R. Tolkien’s children. Inside would be a letter in a strange, spidery handwriting and a beautiful colored drawing or painting. The letters were from Father Christmas.

They told wonderful tales of life at the North Pole: how the reindeer got loose and scattered presents all over the place; how the accident-prone North Polar Bear climbed the North Pole and fell through the roof of Father Christmas’s house into the dining room; how he broke the Moon into four pieces and made the Man in it fall into the back garden; how there were wars with the troublesome horde of goblins who lived in the caves beneath the house, and many more.

Obamacare, Uninsurables Program: I thought this was one of the good things about ObamaCare … 😦

Enrollment around the country has been lower than expected, partly because some people could not afford the premiums. But individual cases have turned out to be costlier than originally projected.

In documents provided to the states, the administration said the program has spent about $2.4 billion in taxpayer money on medical claims and nearly $180 million on administrative costs, as of Dec. 31. Congress allocated $5 billion to the plan.

“From the beginning (the administration) has been committed to monitoring PCIP enrollment and spending closely and making necessary adjustments in the program to ensure responsible management of the $5 billion provided by Congress,” PCIP director Richard Popper wrote in a memo. “To this end, we are implementing a nationwide suspension of enrollment.”

news, journalism, mobile journalism, end of an era, Poynter; “News needs to solve problems” hmmm … ” We need to solve information problems for our users and drive measurable revenue for our advertisers. Mobile is not merely another form factor, but an entirely new ecosystem that rewards utility. Flipboard is a classic example of solving a problem (tablet-based content discovery) while The Daily is an example of a product that did not.”

4. News needs to solve problems

A study by Flurry in November found that the news category only accounts for 2 percent of total time spent on mobile apps. Social apps gobble up 26 percent. Facebook alone accounts for 23 percent of all time spent with mobile apps, according to Comscore in December. That beats every news organization’s app combined by a long shot.

As Facebook (and Twitter) grow in time spent – and since both are populated with plenty of news – they’re increasingly competitive with news organizations’ mobile experiences by sheer volume.

As a result, simply extending a news organizations’ current coverage into mobile isn’t enough. We need to solve information problems for our users and drive measurable revenue for our advertisers. Mobile is not merely another form factor, but an entirely new ecosystem that rewards utility. Flipboard is a classic example of solving a problem (tablet-based content discovery) while The Daily is an example of a product that did not.

“The key insight from thinking about your business this way is that it is the job, and not the customer or the product, that should be the fundamental unit of analysis,” said Clayton Christensen, David Skok and James Allworth in a Nieman report. “This applies to news as much as it does to any other service.”

“The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It’s to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself,” explains Y Combinator’s Paul Graham. “By far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has.”

2013 Festival of Legal Learning, US Supreme Court, US Supreme Court Confirmation Process: One of my favorite lectures. The speaker was a little dry, but I learned a great deal about the confirmation process from nomination to confirmation, vetting both by the White House and the Senate, the role of public relations and media, etc. Once again, I have confirmed that I am a nerd.

Insider’s View of the Supreme Court Confirmation Process

Michael J. Gerhardt, Samuel Ashe Distinguished Professor in Constitutional Law and Director of the Center for Law and Government, UNC School of Law

this session will explore the nuances of the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation process. The speaker has significant experience in this arena. He advised several senators on the nomination of John Roberts as Chief Justice, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the nomination of Samuel Alito Jr., and served as Special Counsel to Chair Patrick Leahy (D-vt.) as well as the Senate Judiciary Committee for the nominations of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.

2013 Festival of Legal Learning, Student Athletes, Penn State, caveat emptor: You should always be ticked when the presenter starts off telling you that there will be very little about Penn State despite the fact that it is in the title.

this session will explain the 2012 U.S. Department of education’s Sexual violence guidance. Institutional liability will be discussed using recent situations involving student-athletes at the high school and college level, as well as the Office of Civil Rights’ complaint against Penn State for the Sandusky scandal.

translation apps, Google App, NYTimes.com: My husband downloaded an arabic translation app for his next trip to Kuwait. We’ll see how that goes …

I’ve been watching Google’s translation tools improve over the years, but this trip would be a true test: could it really blunt the trauma of arriving in a country where the average American is instantly rendered illiterate, deaf and mute?The answer: yes, though knowing your way around it in advance will help. (United Nations interpreters need not fear for their jobs, at least not yet.) Here, then, are my tips, learned the hard way….

Pantomiming and phrasebooks have always worked for you in the past, and are more fun anyway? I hear you. But even if you want to stay old-school, the world is moving on without you. At least once a day during my trip, the Chinese broke out their own translation apps before I had a chance to break out mine. In other words, this train has already left the station. Or, to pick a cliché more appropriate to my trip, you don’t want to miss the boat.

They may have been stranded aboard a busted cruise ship for five days with little food, broken sewage systems and no heat or air conditioning, but at least they’ll get to keep the bathrobe.

On Friday morning, as more than 3,000 tired and dirty customers finally disembarked from the stranded cruise ship Triumph, @CarnivalCruise tweeted, “Of course the bathrobes for the Carnival Triumph are complimentary.”

It was a remarkably tone-deaf finish to a week-long public relations fiasco that began Sunday night when an engine fire crippled the Caribbean-bound ship and set it adrift in the Gulf of Mexico. Nonstop news coverage and social media chatter brought the public vivid images of the fetid conditions aboard the Triumph. Reports from passengers included details about overflowing toilets, hours-long waits to get food and flooded rooms during the five days they were stranded at sea.

The Art of Kissing: A 1936 Guide for Lovers, kith/kin, high school, Westminster Schools, memories, Brain Pickings: I had a friend in high school who got a hold of this. I never laughed so hard as I did one night … Can anyone guess who possessed this “pamphlet”?

Between Edison’s scandalous footage of the first kiss in cinema in 1896 and Bill Plympton’s quirky animated guide to kissing a century later, the public image of lip-locking underwent some radical transformations. In 1936, the year my grandmother was born, a man named Hugh Morris penned a small illustrated pamphlet titled The Art of Kissing (public library), in which he guided young lovers through the techniques, tricks, and “approved methods of kissing,” including such varieties as “the spiritual kiss,” “the nip kiss,” “the pain kiss,” “the surprise kiss,” “the eyelash kiss,” and “the French soul kiss,” as well as tips on how to prepare for a kiss and how to approach a girl. Delightfully dated in its assumptions about love, heterosexuality, and marriage, it’s as much a charming time-capsule of a bygone era as it is a sure source of a good chuckle.

…

THE ‘VACUUM’ KISS

Here you start off by first opening your mouth a trifle just after you have been resting peacefully with closed lips. Indicate to your partner, by brushing her teeth with the tip of your tongue, that you wish for her to do likewise. The moment she responds, instead of caressing her mouth, suck inward as though you were trying to draw out the innards of an orange. If she knows of this kiss variation, your maid will act in the same way and withdraw the air from your mouth. In this fashion, in a very short while, the air will have been entirely drawn out of your mouths. Your lips will adhere so tightly that there will almost be pain, instead of pleasure. But it will be the sort of pain that is highly pleasurable. That may sound odd, but nevertheless it is a fact. Pain becomes so excruciating as to become pleasurable.

StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives. Since 2003, StoryCorps has collected and archived more than 45,000 interviews with nearly 90,000 participants. Each conversation is recorded on a free CD to share, and is preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. StoryCorps is one of the largest oral history projects of its kind, and millions listen to our weekly broadcasts on NPR’s Morning Edition and on our Listen pages.

We do this to remind one another of our shared humanity, strengthen and build the connections between people, teach the value of listening, and weave into the fabric of our culture the understanding that every life matters. At the same time, we will create an invaluable archive of American voices and wisdom for future generations.

In the coming years we will build StoryCorps into an enduring institution that will touch the lives of every American family.

‎”I do think a woman’s place is eventually in the home, but I see no harm in her having some fun before she gets there.”

Georgia, Yumion – the Vidalia Onion, Vidalia GA, kitschy, corporate mascots: I must admit, I would go out of my way to see Yumion … I have done so to see the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile and the Famous Idaho® Potato Truck …

Slapped costco with a lawsuit. These pictures allegedly show tiffany koffs inside a california costco. Tiffany sent someone in, bought one of the rings.

They were not made by tiffany. They are not tiffany rings. They have nothing to do with tiffany.

Reporter: Being sold at a fraction of what real tiffany rings cost. Everybody would love a deal on a tiffany ring. And unfortunately, it just doesn’t happen.

Tiffany diamonds are never on sale. Reporter: Tiffany alleges costco had been selling the fakes for years. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of engagement rings were sold using the tiffany trademark.

Reporter: A rep for costco told abc news, we will be making no comment on this story as it involves pending litigation. Court papers say an unnamed consumer blew the whistle, contacting a tiffany store to complain. She was offended by the fact that tiffany would be selling engagement rings in costco.

In this particular case, there’s enormous room for confusion among consumers because costco does sell a of big brands at deep discounts. Reporter: Shoppers at tiffany’s flagship store weighed in. You think you’re buying into a brand.

And you find out it’s a rip-off. When you buy a tiffany diamond, you’re buying into the row mant schism and there’s only one place to get it. Costco has removed all tiffany labels.

But tiffany is a suing for additional mary damages. And whether customers will sue remains to be seen. If you have any doubt about a tiffany’s item you own, you can bring it into a tiffany’s store.

weddings, trends, gold, The Huffington Post: I am pretty traditional … but I really like the gold …

Beyond emerald and yellow, one of the fastest growing color trends this year in weddings is gold. For a while, gold had become passé as platinum gained in popularity and silver made a resurgence. However, gold is back, and here to stay. With sequins so popular (we’re on board!), and because this color can be paired with so many options from pink to black and white, all that glitters is GOLD for 2013.

With the help of patterns and rose gold, check out our favorite golden wedding ideas in the gallery.

The Marine Corps on Friday unveiled their future mascot. If all goes as planned, Chesty the Recruit will become Private First Class Chesty XIV later this year, replacing Sgt Chesty XIII.

Chesty XIII became one of the most storied dogs in the long history of Marine Corps mascots when he faced off last year with Bravo, the Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s golden retriever.

As chronicled in The Wall Street Journal, the growling confrontation earned Chesty a promotion to Sergeant and raised the bulldog’s reputation among many of the enlisted and officers at the Marine Corps barracks. But it didn’t sit too well with some of the officer’s wives.

Some of the women viewed Chesty the XIII as crotchety and ill-mannered to guests. (Check out the video here.)

The Marines rolled out the red carpet for 9-week old Chesty the Recruit Thursday night at the Home of the Commandants at the Washington, D.C., Marine Barracks. Bonnie Amos, the wife of Marine Corps Commandant James Amos, met the latest Chesty Thursday night.

The Internet may be disrupting much of the book industry, but for short-story writers it has been a good thing.

Story collections, an often underappreciated literary cousin of novels, are experiencing a resurgence, driven by a proliferation of digital options that offer not only new creative opportunities but exposure and revenue as well.

…

“It is the culmination of a trend we have seen building for five years,” said Cal Morgan, the editorial director of Harper Perennial Originals, who until last year ran a blog called Fifty-Two Stories, devoted to short fiction. “The Internet has made people a lot more open to reading story forms that are different from the novel, and you see a generation of writers very engaged in experimentation.”

“Solvitor Ambulando” – It is solved by walking, 2013 Lenten Labyrinth walks, Avondale Presbyterian Church, Augustine of Hippo, Rev. Wes Barry, Ash Wednesday Sermon, First Presbyterian Church: There are days when I wonder why anyone would choose to live anywhere but the southern part of the United States. Today is one of those days.

As I approached the Avondale Presbyterian Church labyrinth, the chimes were clanging and the water poured at its columbarium fountain. Both welcome me.

I reach for an information sheet for the first time in a long time, and Avondale’s labyrinth keepers have changed the sheets since the last time I looked at them. One is entitled, “Light, Darkness, Shadow of death, and the Way of Peace” … rather ominous title 🙂 … I especially liked the these quotes …

In the tender compassion of our God, the dawn from on high shall break upon us to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death and to guide our feet into the way of peace. (from Benedictus, Song of Zechariah)

Light, darkness, shadow of death, peace. These four themes draw us closer in these mid-winter days to God.

Light, darkness, shadow of death, way of peace: may you find yourself caught up in the good news of Jesus Christ and be a part of community called to be Christ’s body in the world.

And from the other sheet …

Augustine of Hippo said, “It is solved by walking.” What is IT? If you want to find out, then you’ll have to do your own walking.

-Barbara Brown Taylor , An Altar to the World

You will show me the path of life. You will fill me with joy in your presence. Psalm 16:11

And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly[a] with your God. Micah 6:8

Let my inner child dance the rainbow, the labyrinth. Chase each color along the way. Thank you, bless you, oh my God. Be with me and I shall begin to shine as you shine;

I then thought about Wes Barry’s Ash Wednesday Sermon from First Presbyterian Church. Two snipits jumped out at me that directly relate to my walking …

Slows down time for us that we might see Jesus …

Four things that make us human: physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual …

Ask a Question: Prior to walking, journal your thoughts or share what you are looking for with another person (they might help you to form your unspoken question). During the walk look at your question from all aspects; walking allows your own consciousness to open so deeper aspects of yourself can speak.

Honour a Benchmark in Your Life or That of Another: a memorial act, a celebratory act, a penitence act, an intercessory act, etc.

Make A Body Prayer: move spontaneously as encouraged by the path, feel safe in its containment, sense kinetic awareness.

Use Accessories: wear a coloured scarf as symbolic of something for you; carry an object of significance to you (votive candle, flower, stone, etc.) Whatever you carry in should be carried out as well.

Suicidal acts with guns are fatal in 85% of cases, while those with pills are fatal in just 2% of cases: NYT http://nyti.ms/XP2FtA

As did this quote in the NYT article … “If you use a gun,” Dr. Miller said, “you usually don’t get a second chance.”

Suicidal acts are often prompted by a temporary surge of rage or despair, and most people who attempt them do not die. In a 2001 study of 13- to 34-year-olds in Houston who had attempted suicide but were saved by medical intervention, researchers from the C.D.C. found that, for more than two-thirds of them, the time that elapsed between deciding to act and taking action was an hour or less. The key to reducing fatalities, experts say, is to block access to lethal means when the suicidal feeling spikes.

The chances of dying rise drastically when a gun is present, because guns are so much more likely to be lethal, said Dr. Matthew Miller, associate director of the Harvard center. Guns are used in more than half of all suicide fatalities, but account for just 1 percent of all self-harm injuries treated in hospital emergency rooms, a rough proxy for suicide attempts, Dr. Miller said. Overdoses, which account for about 80 percent of suicide attempts, are responsible for just 14 percent of fatalities.

“If you use a gun,” Dr. Miller said, “you usually don’t get a second chance.”

MLB, baseball, stadium financing, New Yankee Stadium, tax-exempt bonds, 2013 Festival of Legal Learning: This was one of my favorite seminars … You can just call me a nerd.

Building the New Yankee Stadium: Tax-Exempt Bonds and Other Subsidies for the Richest Team in Baseball

Patricia L. Bryan, Martha Brandis Professor of Law, UNC School of Law

When Yankee Stadium opened in April 2009, aggregate costs had skyrocketed to $2.3 billion, with more than half contributed by taxpayers. the massive federal subsidy resulting from tax-exempt financing bonds presents a particularly troubling issue, especially

In light of convincing evidence that wealthy private owners, and not the broader community, reap the financial benefits of using these bonds for sports stadiums. the enormous—and often hidden—drain on the federal treasury leads to the important questions: are taxpayers striking out on public investments in sports stadiums, and if so, how can these federal subsidies to sports teams be limited in the future?

Frederick Buechner Center, Barbara Brown Taylor: I heard BBT talk last winter and was overwhelmed … this lecture is from 2009 …

If you are among the billions of people who do not know what I am talking about, then the first book was called Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, which chronicled my decision to leave full time parish ministry for college teaching ten years ago now. The second is called An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith, which is a kind of field guide to encountering God in the ordinary practices of everyday life. It comes out next month.

The difference between these two books and those that preceded them—or to put it another way, the difference between the form and content of their proclamations—is what you might call the difference between public and private truth. I don’t think you can ever draw a clear line between those two, since private truth is always going to flavor public truth. I am not even sure it is a good idea to make a distinction between them. If your private truth and your public truth are very far apart, shouldn’t you be seeking professional help?

…

I know Christians who speak of the “scandal of particularity,” by which they mean the apparently outlandish claim that God chose to be made known in a particular person living in a particular human body during a particular period of history. You will have to invite a theologian to say more about that, but I like to think that people who are inclined to accept such a claim might be willing to accept the scandal of their own particularity too.

…

Still, I was paying attention when the dean introduced Frederick Buechner, the Beecher Lecturer for 1977, whose lectures were entitled “Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale.”

Great title, I thought, as the elegant man stepped into the pulpit. When he opened his mouth, I was struck first by the voice: restrained but insistent, as if he had something important to tell us that he would not yell to make sure we heard. If we wanted to hear him, then he expected us to do our parts. His job was not to make things easy for us. His job was to say something true that mattered.

The next thing I noticed was his sentence structure, which was odd and looping, beguiling to the ear. Each word had earned its place in his speech. Each word had been chosen for its meaning, but also for its beat. If I could have blurred my ears the way I sometimes blur my eyes, then I might have imagined that I was listening to a poet instead of a preacher—or to a composer conducting his score—but that would have required at least a moment’s disengagement from the words themselves, which I was not willing to give.

While I was still trying to figure out how he was doing it, Buechner began conjuring up the living presence of Henry Ward Beecher, his predecessor by more than a century, the first Beecher Lecturer in 1872.

…

the places they go and the things they do, there is the sense of what the old hymn quaveringly addresses as “O love that will not let me go,” the sense of an ultimate depth to things that is not finally indifferent as to whether people sink or swim but endlessly if always hiddenly refuses to abandon them. Brownie loses his faith and his teeth. Lucille teerers off to her death on French heels. Open Heart goes up in flames, and the Love Feasts are run out of Alexander Hall. And yet…Here’s to Jesus, Here’s to you, proclaims the air-borne streamer high over Nassau Street, and even Antonio Parr wonders at the end if it is maybe more than just a silvery trick of the failing light to which every once in a while the Tonto in him whispers Kemo Sabe, faithful friend. Maybe the reason any book about something like real life is a love-letter is that in the last analysis that is what real life is too.[3]

Sorry that was so long. I just wanted to hear the words coming out of my mouth, as the perfect finish to The Buechner Lecture.

…

So thank you, Frederick Buechner, for the time you have spent looking in the mirror that we might see ourselves more clearly. Thank you for telling the truth, both about yourself and about the gospel, that we might tell it too. Thanks even for nicking yourself, so that you could write for us in blood instead of ballpoint pen. We can tell the difference, and we are in your debt.

Latin, More Intelligent Life, essays: Love this essay … so here it is in full…

For Intelligent Life’s editor, Tim de Lisle, the best language to learn is one that has hardly any direct use…

I studied Latin for 15 years, and this may well be the first time it has been of direct use in my adult life. There was one moment, long ago, when it nearly came in handy. I was reviewing an album by Sting that contained a stab at a traditional wedding song. There are many such songs in Catullus, whose elegant poetry I had spent a whole term plodding through. If ever there was a time to play the Latin card, this was it, so I described Sting’s wedding song as “Catullan”. Somewhere between the Daily Telegraph copytakers and the subs, “Catullan” was changed to “Catalan”. It probably served me right.

So, direct use: virtually nil. But Latin—which gives us both “direct” and “use”, both “virtually” and “nil”—has been of indirect use every day of my career. If you work with words, Latin is the Pilates session that stays with you for life: it strengthens the core. It teaches you grammar and syntax, better than your own language, whose structure you will have absorbed before you are capable of noticing it. Latin offers no hiding place, no refuge for the woolly. Each piece of the sentence has to slot in with the rest; every ending has to be the right one. To learn Latin is to learn rigour.

The price for the rigour is the mortis. Soon enough, someone will helpfully inform you that Latin is a dead language. In one way, sure, but in others it lives on. It is a vivid presence in English and French, it is the mother of Italian and Spanish, and it even seeps into German. More often than not, the words these languages have in common are the Latin ones: it remains a lingua franca. The words we take from Latin tend to be long, reflective, intellectual (the short, punchy words we didn’t need to import: live, die, eat, drink, love, hate). Business and academia, two worlds with little else in common, both rely more and more on long Latinate words. The European Union speaks little else. Ten years ago, for another article, I had to read the proposed European constitution. It was a long turgid parade of Latin-derived words. The burghers of Brussels were trying to build a superstate out of abstract nouns.

Management-speak and Euro-blather are Latin at its worst, but learning it will still help you cut through them to find clarity. It is a little harder to bullshit when you’ve learnt Latin (though quite possible to bluster, as Boris Johnson proves). And if you stick at it you discover, after no more than eight or nine years, that this is a glorious language per se.

Lautenberg is last WWII veteran in the Senate. Two remain in House: Ralph Hall and John Dingell.

…

The recent death of Senator Daniel K. Inouye, a celebrated World War II veteran, coincided in many ways with the waning influence of veterans in American politics. There are now only three World War II veterans in Congress: Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, Representative Ralph Hall of Texas and Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan. Over all, the number of veterans joining Congress has perpetuated a four-decade-long slide.

…

The interplay between politics, the military and veterans is a complicated subject matter. Although war is supposed to be an extension of politics, we don’t want service members associated with politics. Some historians surmise that Lincoln removed Gen. George B. McClellan, the top Union Army general, partly because General McClellan showed too great of an interest in politics.

…

In recent decades the number of military veterans in Congress has greatly diminished, but this trend will somewhat reverse as Afghanistan and Iraq veterans come of age. Although this past election cycle was focused on domestic issues and the economy, it will be interesting to analyze whether veterans running for office place a great emphasis on their military service in an election cycle in which foreign policy is a major issue. It will also be interesting to note how veterans of my generation contextualize their service and explain what lessons they learned from our recent wars. Veterans are not a homogenous group, and every veteran takes away a different lesson from military experience.

Ring in MJ’s 50th with this five-course birthday dinner that includes a shrimp cocktail with a 23-spice cocktail sauce and a 50-day dry-aged Wagyu rib eye. Finish things off with a complimentary piece of chocolate layer cake, which also clocks in at 23 layers and will likely put your pants into a Space Jam.

It seems hard to imagine that one of the most iconic figures in the history of basketball is getting up in age. There hasn’t been a parade celebrating an NBA Championship in Chicago since 1998, but it seems like only yesterday that MJ was still in his Bulls uniform and mesmerizing us all as he delivered title after title.

To commemorate Jordan’s 50th birthday, the latest issue of Sports Illustrated will feature MJ on the cover for a record 50th time.

After eight years of providing seafood for ATL restaurant heavyweights eager to turn you into one (Bacchanalia, McKendrick’s Steak House…), the family behind Irvington Seafood in Mobile, AL decided to throw their (presumably cool, floppy sailor’s) hat in the ring with Pier 213: a nautical-themed outpost serving up a variety of fried, grilled, and steamed plates from under the sea. Under the sea!